Decoding the Legal Void: Bridging the Gaps in Indonesian Property Law in the Age of Digital Transformation
摘要
The development of digital, financial, and computational technologies in the last decade has destabilised the conceptual foundations of property law in Indonesia. The concept of property, which has been based on the materiality and physicality of legal objects, has been delegitimised with the advent of non-physical objects such as digital assets, tokens, and algorithms. Although these objects have significant economic functions, Indonesian property law continues to maintain the old paradigm that ignores the role of technology-based objects. The absence of positive norms does not cause this legal vacuum; rather, it reflects the inability of the legal system to interpret these new objects within the established framework of property. The legal semiotics approach explains that the legal vacuum results from a signifying operation that refuses to recognise digital objects as part of the property law system. Through this analysis, the doctrine of relational meaning-based property is proposed as an alternative to overcome the legal vacuum. This doctrine emphasises that property should be determined by the relational function and legal meaning attached to objects within the socio-economic network, rather than by their physical form alone. Thus, the legal vacuum is not a passive space, but a field of doctrinal choices that determines the direction of Indonesian property law’s development amid technological transformation.